New Treasure Seekers; Or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune
Lymchurch.
"I 'spect she can't afford good butcher's meat," said Mrs. Beale; "but
your pa, I expect he pays for you, and I lay he'd like you to have your
fill of something as'll lay acrost your chesties." So she made a
Yorkshire pudding as well. It was good.
After dinner we sat on the sea-wall, feeling more like after dinner than
we had felt for days, and Dora said--
"Poor Miss Sandal! I never thought about her being hard-up, somehow. I
wish we could do something to help her."
"We might go out street-singing," Noel said. But that was no good,
because there is only one street in the village, and the people there
are much too poor for one to be able to ask them for anything. And all
round it is fields with only sheep, who have nothing to give except
their wool, and when it comes to taking that, they are never asked.
Dora thought we might get Father to give her money, but Oswald knew this
would never do.
Then suddenly a thought struck some one--I will not say who--and that
some one said--
"She ought to let lodgings, like all the other people do in Lymchurch."
That was the beginning of it. The end--for that day--was our getting the
top of a cardboard box and printing on it the following lines in as
many different coloured chalks as we happened to have with us.
LODGINGS TO LET.
ENQUIRE INSIDE.
We ruled spaces for the letters to go in, and did it very neatly. When
we went to bed we stuck it in our bedroom window with stamp-paper.
In the morning when Oswald drew up his blind there was quite a crowd of
kids looking at the card. Mrs. Beale came out and shoo-ed them away as
if they were hens. And we did not have to explain the card to her at
all. She never said anything about it. I never knew such a woman as Mrs.
Beale for minding her own business. She said afterwards she supposed
Miss Sandal had told us to put up the card.
Well, two or three days went by, and nothing happened, only we had a
letter from Miss Sandal, telling us how the poor sufferer was groaning,
and one from Father telling us to be good children, and not get into
scrapes. And people who drove by used to look at the card and laugh.
And then one day a carriage came driving up with a gentleman in it, and
he saw the rainbow beauty of our chalked card, and he got out and came
up the path. He had a pale face, and white hair and very bright eyes
that moved about quickly like a bird's, and he was dressed in a quite
new tweed suit that did not fit him very well.
Dora and Alice answered the door before any one had time to knock, and
the author has reason to believe their hearts were beating wildly.
"How much?" said the gentleman shortly.
Alice and Dora were so surprised by his suddenness that they could only
reply--
"Er--er----"
"Just so," said the gentleman briskly as Oswald stepped modestly forward
and said--
"Won't you come inside?"
"The very thing," said he, and came in.
We showed him into the dining-room and asked him to excuse us a minute,
and then held a breathless council outside the door.
"It depends how many rooms he wants," said Dora.
"Let's say so much a room," said Dicky, "and extra if he wants Mrs.
Beale to wait on him."
So we decided to do this. We thought a pound a room seemed fair.
And we went back.
"How many rooms do you want?" Oswald asked.
"All the room there is," said the gentleman.
"They are a pound each," said Oswald, "and extra for Mrs. Beale."
"How much altogether?"
Oswald thought a minute and then said "Nine rooms is nine pounds, and
two pounds a week for Mrs. Beale, because she is a widow."
"Done!" said the gentleman. "I'll go and fetch my portmanteaus."
He bounced up and out and got into his carriage and drove away. It was
not till he was finally gone quite beyond recall that Alice suddenly
said--
"But if he has all the rooms where are _we_ to sleep?"
"He must be awfully rich," said H.O., "wanting all those rooms."
"Well, he can't sleep in more than one at once," said Dicky, "however
rich he is. We might wait till he was bedded down and then sleep in the
rooms he didn't want."
But Oswald was firm. He knew that if the man paid for the rooms he must
have them to himself.
"He won't sleep in the kitchen," said Dora; "couldn't we sleep there?"
But we all said we couldn't and wouldn't.
Then Alice suddenly said--
"I know! The Mill. There are heaps and heaps of fishing-nets there, and
we could each take a blanket like Indians and creep over under cover of
the night after the Beale has gone, and get back before she comes in the
morning."
It seemed a sporting thing to do, and we agreed. Only Dora said she
thought it would be draughty.
Of course we went over to the Mill at once to lay our plans and prepare
for the silent watches of the night.
There are three stories to a windmill, besides the ground-floor. The
first floor is pretty empty; the next is nearly full of millstones and
machinery, and the one above is where the corn runs down from on to the
millstones.
We settled to let the girls have the first floor, which was covered with
heaps of nets, and we would pig in with the millstones on the floor
above.
We had just secretly got out the last of the six blankets from the house
and got it into the Mill disguised in a clothes-basket, when we heard
wheels, and there was the gentleman back again. He had only got one
portmanteau after all, and that was a very little one.
Mrs. Beale was bobbing at him in the doorway when we got up. Of course
we had told her he had rented rooms, but we had not said how many, for
fear she should ask where we were going to sleep, and we had a feeling
that but few grown-ups would like our sleeping in a mill, however much
we were living the higher life by sacrificing ourselves to get money for
Miss Sandal.
The gentleman ordered sheep's-head and trotters for dinner, and when he
found he could not have that he said--
"Gammon and spinach!"
But there was not any spinach in the village, so he had to fall back on
eggs and bacon. Mrs. Beale cooked it, and when he had fallen back on it
she washed up and went home. And we were left. We could hear the
gentleman singing to himself, something about woulding he was a bird
that he might fly to thee.
Then we got the lanterns that you take when you go "up street" on a dark
night, and we crept over to the Mill. It was much darker than we
expected.
We decided to keep our clothes on, partly for warmness and partly in
case of any sudden alarm or the fishermen wanting their nets in the
middle of the night, which sometimes happens if the tide is favourable.
We let the girls keep the lantern, and we went up with a bit of candle
Dicky had saved, and tried to get comfortable among the millstones and
machinery, but it was not easy, and Oswald, for one, was not sorry when
he heard the voice of Dora calling in trembling tones from the floor
below.
"Oswald! Dicky!" said the voice, "I wish one of you would come down a
sec."
Oswald flew to the assistance of his distressed sister.
"It's only that we're a little bit uncomfortable," she whispered. "I
didn't want to yell it out because of Noel and H.O. I don't want to
frighten them, but I can't help feeling that if anything popped out of
the dark at us I should die. Can't you all come down here? The nets are
quite comfortable, and I do wish you would."
Alice said she was not frightened, but suppose there were rats, which
are said to infest old buildings, especially mills?
So we consented to come down, and we told Noel and H.O. to come down
because it was more comfy, and it is easier to settle yourself for the
night among fishing-nets than among machinery. There _was_ a rustling
now and then among the heap of broken chairs and jack-planes and baskets
and spades and hoes and bits of the spars of ships at the far end of our
sleeping apartment, but Dicky and Oswald resolutely said it was the wind
or else jackdaws making their nests, though, of course, they knew this
is not done at night.
Sleeping in a mill was not nearly the fun we had thought it would
be--somehow. For one thing, it was horrid not having a pillow, and the
fishing-nets were so stiff you could not bunch them up properly to make
one. And unless you have been born and bred a Red Indian you do not know
how to manage your blanket so as to make it keep out the draughts. And
when we had put out the light Oswald more than once felt as though
earwigs and spiders were walking on his face in the dark, but when we
struck a match there was nothing there.
And empty mills do creak and rustle and move about in a very odd way.
Oswald was not afraid, but he did think we might as well have slept in
the kitchen, because the gentleman could not have wanted to use that
when he was asleep. You see, we thought then that he would sleep all
night like other people.
We got to sleep at last, and in the night the girls edged up to their
bold brothers, so that when the morning sun "shone in bars of dusty gold
through the chinks of the aged edifice" and woke us up we were all lying
in a snuggly heap like a litter of puppies.
"Oh, I _am_ so stiff!" said Alice, stretching. "I never slept in my
clothes before. It makes me feel as if I had been starched and ironed
like a boy's collar."
We all felt pretty much the same. And our faces were tired too, and
stiff, which was rum, and the author cannot account for it, unless it
really was spiders that walked on us. I believe the ancient Greeks
considered them to be venomous, and perhaps that's how their venom
influences their victims.
"I think mills are merely beastly," remarked H.O. when we had woke him
up. "You can't wash yourself or brush your hair or anything."
"You aren't always so jolly particular about your hair," said Dicky.
"Don't be so disagreeable," said Dora.
And Dicky rejoined, "Disagreeable yourself!"
There is certainly something about sleeping in your clothes that makes
you feel not so kind and polite as usual. I expect this is why tramps
are so fierce and knock people down in lonely roads and kick them.
Oswald knows he felt just like kicking any one if they had happened to
cheek him the least little bit. But by a fortunate accident nobody did.
The author believes there is a picture called "Hopeless Dawn." We felt
exactly like that. Nothing seemed the least bit of good.
It was a pitiful band with hands and faces dirtier than any one would
believe who had not slept in a mill or witnessed others who had done so,
that crossed the wet, green grass between the Mill and the white house.
"I shan't ever put morning dew into my poetry again," Noel said; "it is
not nearly so poetical as people make out, and it is as cold as ice,
right through your boots."
We felt rather better when we had had a good splash in the brick-paved
back kitchen that Miss Sandal calls the bath-room. And Alice made a fire
and boiled a kettle and we had some tea and eggs. Then we looked at the
clock and it was half-past five. So we hastened to get into another part
of the house before Mrs. Beale came.
"I wish we'd tried to live the higher life some less beastly way," said
Dicky as we went along the passage.
"Living the higher life always hurts at the beginning," Alice said. "I
expect it's like new boots, only when you've got used to it you're glad
you bore it at first. Let's listen at the doors till we find out where
he isn't sleeping."
So we listened at all the bedroom doors, but not a snore was heard.
"Perhaps he was a burglar," said H.O., "and only pretended to want
lodgings so as to get in and bone all the valuables."